Israel Propaganda (see American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)), (see Israel Lobby)
Updated 2024-04-03
2024-02-15 Israel’s Big Game Propaganda Israel took advantage of 123 million TV viewers — the most since the 1969 Moon landing — to ply its propaganda during Sunday’s U.S. football championship match, writes Alan MacLeod. Nestled between the typical ads for cars and beer were two bizarre messages: one from the Foundation to Combat anti-Semitism (FCAS) and the other from the State of Israel itself. Both were intimately related to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and trying to draw attention away from Israeli war crimes.
Super Bowl ads do not come cheap, and its $7 million for 30-second air time price tag was footed by the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots N.F.L. franchise, Robert Kraft. Kraft (net worth: $11 billion) made his fortune in the paper and packaging business and has deep ties to the state of Israel, including donating hundreds of millions of dollars to pro-Israel groups and funding pro-Israel candidates in U.S. elections. He even enjoys a close relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Super Bowl viewers were subjected to another pro-Israel ad in between the action, this one directly funded by and representing the Israeli government. “To all the dads,” the voiceover says, as images of wholesome fatherhood activities play on the screen, “The funny ones, the silly ones, the strong ones, the adventurous ones. To all the dads held in captivity by Hamas for over 120 days, we vow to bring you home.” this was an attempt to sway the American public into identifying with Israel, suggesting that this could happen to any of their fathers’ too. https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/15/israels-big-game-propaganda/
2024-02-07 NETANYAHU’S WAR ON TRUTH Two weeks before Hamas commandos led a series of raids into Israel on October 7, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before an empty chamber at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. The Israeli prime minister brandished a map of what he promised could be the “New Middle East.” It depicted a state of Israel that stretched continuously from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. On this map, Gaza and the West Bank were erased. Palestinians did not exist.
He was speaking on the grand stage of the U.N. General Assembly, but no world leaders bothered to attend. Outside, some 2,000 people, a mixture of American Jews and Israeli citizens, protested his attacks on the independence of the Israeli judiciary system. The scene served as a reminder of how deeply unpopular his far-right governing coalition, not to mention Netanyahu himself, had become in Israel. At that moment, it seemed that Netanyahu was pushed against the ropes, in a losing battle to continue his political reign.
Just days later, as Hamas commandos penetrated the barriers encircling Gaza and embarked on their deadly raids targeting several military installations as well as kibbutzim, everything changed in an instant. Just as the Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to justify a sweeping war in which it declared the world a battlefield, Netanyahu is using the horrors of October 7 to wage the crusade he’s been preparing for his entire political career. With his grip on power fading last fall, the October 7 attacks provided him with just the opportunity he needed, and he hitched his political survival to the war on Gaza and what could be his last chance to eliminate Israel’s Palestinian problem once and for all. https://theintercept.com/2024/02/07/gaza-israel-netanyahu-propaganda-lies-palestinians/
2024-01-09 The Psychology of Israeli Propaganda Who are the main targets of Israeli propaganda? Why do they believe in it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YCQV_iUGRE
2023-12-07 Israel’s Propaganda is Getting INSANE (w/ Abby Martin) Independent journalist Abby Martin has spent much of her career reporting on Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, and was personally affected by anti-BDS legislation when she was disinvited from speaking at Georgia Southern University because she refused to sign an anti BDS pledge. Today, she joins Bad Faith to discuss the new wave of “hasbsra,” or Israeli media manipulation, that has quickly shifted the focus from 40 imaginary beheaded babies, to a non-existent “command center” under Al-Shifa hospital, to “new” allegations of sexual assault on October 7th. Meanwhile, the media ignores dead Palestinian babies left to decompose in the NICU by Israeli soldiers, Palestinian children shot in cold blood in the West Bank, and the authoritarian bent of congress deeming anti-Zionism anti-semitism. How do they get away with it all, and what’s the current state of things on the ground in Gaza? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LMlu5beoqs
2023-12-06 Scandal-stained Israeli ‘rescue’ group fuels October 7 fabrications During an October 31 Senate hearing on Israel’s war in Gaza, Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered his rationale for rejecting a ceasefire. Summoning as much emotion as a dour Democratic Party operative could muster, Blinken conjured up a gruesome scene intended to illustrate the savagery of Hamas, and the impossibility of negotiations with such an organization: “A young boy and girl, 6 and 8 years old, and their parents around the breakfast table,” Blinken intoned. “The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.” The Secretary of State concluded, “That is what this [Israeli] society is dealing with.”
Though Blinken did not state the source of his disturbing claim – and was not prompted to do so by any senator – it matched testimony delivered by Yossi Landau, the head of operations for the southern Israel region of a religious “disaster victim identification” organization called ZAKA. Indeed, Landau has rehashed various forms of the story Blinken referenced since October 12, detailing how Hamas militants viciously mutilated and killed a 6 and 8 year-old child and their parents in Kibbutz Beeri before dining in their home.
Despite the presence of multiple potential witnesses inside Beeri before ZAKA arrived to collect dead bodies, independent testimony corroborating Landau’s claim has yet to surface. Further, there are no recorded deaths of siblings around the age of 6 to 8 in Beeri on October 7. Any record of a young child killed in the manner Landau described is similarly nonexistent, as are photos of the murdered family he described. In fact, the only siblings anywhere close to this age range who died in the community on that day—12-year-old twins Liel and Yanai Hetrzroni—were killed by Israeli tank shelling.
Landau’s story – and by extension, Blinken’s testimony before the Senate – therefore appears to have been spun out of whole cloth; a cynical fabrication intended to dramatize the supposed barbarism of Hamas in order to widen the political space for Israel’s rampage in the Gaza Strip. As this investigation will demonstrate, Landau’s tale was merely one of many tall tales concocted by a small circle of dubious characters who have managed to shape the official narrative of October 7 in Western media.
Though Israeli officials played a central role in Tel Aviv’s misinformation campaign surrounding the events of October 7— falsely claiming, for instance, that the bodies of dead Jewish babies were found dangling from a laundry line in one kibbutz—the most inflammatory allegations have emerged from a collection of ultra-Orthodox volunteer organizations such as ZAKA. Though ZAKA specializes “in body collection and disposal,” the group has no coronary credentials and is staffed by droves of poorly trained volunteers.
From “confirming” the fraudulent story of beheaded babies found in a kibbutz to blatantly inventing others about Hamas fighters cutting fetuses out of pregnant women’s bodies, severing a little girl’s arm, and baking a baby in an oven, ZAKA and rival groups have demonstrated a remarkable gift for seeding the media with depraved tales of alleged Hamas brutality. In doing so, they have armed Western leaders like Blinken and President Joe Biden with the narrative they would weaponize in order to block ceasefire proposals and rearm a military that has killed over 15,000 civilians in Gaza in less than two months. https://thegrayzone.com/2023/12/06/scandal-israeli-october-7-fabrications/
2023-12-05 Israel’s PR Machine – KPFA – Against the Grain Frank Luntz thinks that Israel has a public relations problem in the United States, which may seem surprising given that until recently a majority of Americans have favored Israel’s actions against the Palestinians. The rightwing spin doctor, a longtime advisor to Israel on how to shape American public opinion, believes that such longstanding support is fraying. “The Occupation of the American Mind” examines the history of the public relations campaign waged by the Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel lobby to shape American popular opinion about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and examines the growing criticism of Israel within the U.S. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fund-drive-special-israels-pr-machine/id78900506?
2023-12-05 Horrors In Gaza & Israel’s Sloppy Propaganda Two months into the genocide in Gaza, Israel’s propaganda has never been more transparent and sloppy. To discuss this and critical historical context, Rania Khalek is joined by Mouin Rabbani, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kviD4vTFjlM
2023-12-04 Debunking Israel’s “mass rapes” atrocity propaganda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMqRK5LpGy4
2023-11-25 Justifying the Unjustifiable in Palestine Ralph is joined by author and human rights activist Miko Peled. They discuss the excuses that Israel uses to defend the atrocities they commit against Palestinians, and the truth behind all the propaganda. https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/justifying-the-unjustifiable-in-palestine
2018-05-30 The Occupation of the American Mind (original 84-minute version) Over the past few years, Israel’s ongoing military occupation of Palestinian territory and repeated invasions of the Gaza strip have triggered a fierce backlash against Israeli policies virtually everywhere in the world — except the United States. The Occupation of the American Mind takes an eye-opening look at this critical exception, zeroing in on pro-Israel public relations efforts within the U.S.
Narrated by Roger Waters and featuring leading observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. media culture, the film explores how the Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel lobby have joined forces, often with very different motives, to shape American media coverage of the conflict in Israel’s favor. From the U.S.-based public relations campaigns that emerged in the 1980s to today, the film provides a sweeping analysis of Israel’s decades-long battle for the hearts, minds, and tax dollars of the American people in the face of widening international condemnation of its increasingly right-wing policies. Narrated by Roger Waters / Featuring Amira Hass, M.J. Rosenberg, Stephen M. Walt, Noam Chomsky, Rula Jebreal, Henry Siegman, Rashid Khalidi, Rami Khouri, Yousef Munayyer, Norman Finkelstein, Max Blumenthal, Phyllis Bennis, Norman Solomon, Mark Crispin Miller, Peter Hart, and Sut Jhally.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP0-YohJR-g&list=PLcKTcNwy7BrF2fsCRkNDSpVvfpG6_RKiW&index=3
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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
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